Friday, November 6

Drop In and Decorate: Bake, Decorate, and Donate Cookies

With the holidays approaching, many of us will be knee deep in flour, sugar, icing, and sprinkles making scores of holiday cookies. Of course, many of us make scores of cookies year-round because cookies just make us happy. Well if you're a cookie lover and love to make people happy, then you should know about Drop In & Decorate, a year-round, nonprofit organization, created by food writer and friend, Lydia Walshin of The Perfect Pantry.

Lydia founded Drop In & Decorate in 2002, and before the end of this year, the 10,000th cookie will be decorated and donated . Here's how Drop In & Decorate works:

1. Bake some cookies.

2. Gather a group of family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc. to decorate them

3. Donate the cookies to a nonprofit agency serving basic human needs in your own community.

If you’d like to host your own Drop In & Decorate® event, Pillsbury and Wilton would like to help. Pillsbury has donated 50 VIP coupons, worth $3.00 each, off any Pillsbury product -- including sugar cookie mix, icing and flour -- to be distributed, first come, first served, while supply lasts, to anyone who plans to host a Drop In & Decorate event (max. 5 coupons per person). And Wilton will throw in a Comfort Grip cookie cutter, while supplies lasts. Write to lydia AT ninecooks DOT com for more information on how to get your free coupons and cookie cutters.

Susan, thanks so much for helping to spread the word. Cookies are such a powerful expression of love and caring, aren't they? I'll be most grateful to any of your readers who can post about this on their blogs -- or event host their own events. I'm here to help in any way.

I just had a Drop In party for my birthday – we did over 250 cookies for a local food pantry.

This will be my 4th year doing a Drop In at work. Staff and clients in a brain injury rehab. program love it. Last year we had extra cookies after our planned donation, so I took them to Curves and sold them, then donated the money to a local food pantry.